Slashdot Mirror
Best Open Source Business Tools?
An anonymous reader writes "My wife and I started an S Corp in 2009 mainly to provide small scale consulting services for friends with small businesses of their own (we build them websites and do odd technical jobs). Now that the year is closing I'm giving thought to our corporate tax filings which will be due March 15th. I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources. It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community since reducing the cost of entry into small business could drive open source development. What are the best sources of open source legal templates, tax filing software, corporate compliance templates, etc?" What experiences have others had with open sources businesses and the best way to consolidate the necessary corporate mojo into a workable model?
I'm not an expert in this field, but it would surprise me greatly if there were Free templates of the sort you seek. For starters, most business law is governed by state law rather than federal law, so the requirements will depend in large part on where you are incorporated.
Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information (i.e. lawyers, accountants, tax firms, etc.) It is in their own financial best interests not to give away that which they need to make their own ends meet. Business law and tax law are very convoluted and generally require quite a bit of specialization.
I can see the possibility of Free tools for W2s and meeting minutes, but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials. Also, even if they were available, I would go in with both eyes open because as a business owner, you're on the hook for making sure you're using correct and current information, and taxes in particular change with alarming regularity.
----------
Something cleverCall me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.
GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.
As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259
One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver
I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.
If you're doing well in your business, you won't have time to dick around creating "legal" documents and preparing your own taxes. That's what CPAs, and attorneys are for. If you had hired one of the two, he probably would have advised you to form an LLC rather than an S-Corp. But since you decided you knew better, you made a LOT more work for yourself.
I realize that I may incite a religious war between the TaxCut camp and the TurboTax camp, but using a $75 piece of professional software seems like a good investment. Either would probably do, though I've used TaxCut for most of a decade for my LLC, and it walks you through the business filings pretty decently.
I'll presume that you chose an S-Corp for a reason, and won't badger you about using an LLC for a two-man shop. I will strongly recommend that you go over to irs.gov and read up on the S-Corp rules. There are a bunch of very helpful publications, and the IRS has gotten much more customer-oriented over the years.
I'd say the same but there are sites like Legalzoom.com and such that offer it for a price. I wonder if they have the same issue ? I honestly don't know but I wonder if they have a disclaimer us OSS people could use as well to protect us from this sort of thing.
True, though Legalzoom might be a special case. The people behind it are lawyers, so they are much less likely to make such a mistake on the forms. They would also be well-equipped to defend themselves in a lawsuit. Legalzoom is a (presumably) profitable company so a lawsuit, even a successful one, is unlikely to be a showstopper for them. The corporation would be sued but not its individual members. I'd imagine this wouldn't be nearly the showstopper that the same thing happening to a regular non-lawyer citizen who gets personally sued could be.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I've had my business for about nine years - and we do lots and lots of IT management & consulting.
Regardless of how small your business is you need to hire a competent accountant. Free forms are no substitute for education and experience in this field, and you can seriously screw yourself over (legally *or* financially) if you don't know what you're doing. I use the services of a contracted attorney, a contracted general business accountant, a contracted bookkeeper and a contracted federal tax accountant. And I've only got three people on our full time payroll.
Relying solely on free forms is similar to saying, "This free Linux CD will handle all of my company's data processing, storage, management, security & protection needs by itself. We won't need any IT staff at all!"
In light of the topic, I am not giving anyone legal advice nor do my comments intend to replace, compliment, or supplement the enlightened advice of an attorney in your state. In fact, I might be completely wrong so do not rely on anything I say. These are merely my uneducated opinions on the topic at hand.
Interstingly, Legalzoom is a corporation and as such, is not legally allowed to provide legal advice. Many states, allow for Limited Liability Partnerships which as similar to corps. but do not entirely insulate an individual from a lawsuit. In an LLP, one partner is not liable for the malpractice of another partner, but each is liable for his/her own malpractice. Thus, LLPs do not provide absolute insulation from professional liability but the firm as a whole is insulated for another's liability.
Corporations have much broader insulation for shareholders to encourage investment. LLP's aren't allowed to have non-professional investors. Thus, if the LLP is a law firm then only lawyers may invest in the LLP. If the LLP is a medical practice, then only doctors. Basically, most states don't want to guarantee no liability for people in these fields but still want to encourage efficient partnerships. Thus, the LLP was formed.
The fact the Legalzoom exists as a corporation tends to promote the idea that these form providers are not handing out legal advice, at least not under the definition of the states where they provide there forms. Of course, they may be "risking" it and might be in violation of some state's law, but I didn't take the time to go check any individual state's law on the unauthorized practice of law with reference to "legal" forms. There is likely some case law out there with respect to tax forms and wills/trusts forms since people have been publishing self-help books with template forms in those areas for decades.
You can sue anyone for anything, it's getting the court to agree that's the hard part. In this case, no sane judge is going to agree with assertion that posting a document template or example form to the Internet constitutes bona fide legal advice.
The root problem here is that the submitter wants to be able to do all the things that a certified lawyer (or accountant, etc) is trained to do, but doesn't want to hire one.
Whether it constitutes legal advice or not is a moot point to me. I wouldn't expect that to be the basis of the lawsuit anyway. I'd expect such a (hypothetical) lawsuit to be more like a product liability issue. In this case, the legal forms as a type of intellectual property are the product. In my opinion, the law in general is written by lawyers for lawyers, and they have little or no interest in making it as simple and easy to understand as possible, especially for laymen. Therefore, this is an unusually complex product for which there might be product liability. Or maybe not. That's the part I have no clue about, as I'm definitely not a lawyer so I can only speculate in an uninformed fashion.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I spent a great deal of time looking for good web based, open-source accounting software, but found absolutely nothing that comes close to Quickbooks.
Right now, I'm using SQL Ledger, which is more-or-less OK, but the UI is firmly rooted in about 1990 and printing (especially checks) is really lacking. And while Quickbooks might run udner Wine, I'm really looking for something web-based so I can enter billing information and look stuff up from "wherever", instead of waiting to get back to the office.
Quickbooks Online might be an option, although for some reason, they support Firefox, but not on Linux (User agent switcher seems to make it work just fine).
As much as I hate paying for something every month, and don't really trust Intuit with my data, they're pretty much the only reasonable choice right now for a small business.